FOOTBALL: Widener coach has seen both sides of rout

CHESTER — Isaac Collins was beneath The Citadel’s headphones in November of 2008, straining to call the defensive signals against Florida, yet watching Tim Tebow throw three touchdown passes. He knew then, as he knows now, that football can be that way sometimes.

“Urban Meyer put up 70 on us,” Collins said. “So I was on the other side that day.”

He was on the wrong side in 2008, his defense flattened, 70-19, by the Gators, who were on their way to a national championship.

And he was on the right side last weekend, as the head coach at Widener, which flattened Wilkes, 90-0. So just as Collins was able to deal with a tough loss then, he was fine with a heavy victory Saturday, even if it did back him onto a different kind of defense, trying to justify the spread.

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“Well, I think it was a combination,” Collins said. “Our kids played really well. It was a hot day. I think they wore down a little bit. I can’t even describe it. We only had the ball for 24 minutes. We had four freshmen score touchdowns in the fourth quarter. So it was just shocking to us to even go through it.”

There were no immediate charges of unnecessary scoreboard roughness, but even if there were, Collins had answers.

Sure, he’d left starting quarterback Chris Haupt in after building a 35-0 halftime lead. For didn’t the Pride have a 31-0 halftime pad against Lycoming last season, only to exhale with a 31-28 victory? Sure, Widener kept scoring even while comfortably ahead. But wasn’t the final TD by a fifth-string tailback?

“If you come out in the second half and you are up, 35-0, and you put your backup in and he throws two picks, the next thing you know you are in a dogfight,” Collins said. “And to me, that would be the wrong approach to take with our football team because we are working to win a MAC title and you can’t drop any games along the way. And certainly from our standpoint, we wanted to close the game out the right way.”

Haupt’s sixth touchdown pass of the day came with 7:00 left in the third and put the Pride ahead, 62-0. Widener scored four fourth-quarter touchdowns, three on running plays, one on a fumble return. Eleven different Pride players scored touchdowns. Widener threw one fourth-quarter pass and never faced fourth down in the second half, thus relieving Collins of any decision to attempt a possible rub-it-in field goal.

“And another thing that was missed was that we had a lot of guys who didn’t dress because they were playing in our ‘B’ team game the following day (against Gallaca), and the NCAA doesn’t allow them to play two games,” Collins said. “So you can’t play deeper into your depth chart. I’ve heard that, ‘Why didn’t you play some of your fours and fives?’ Well, if we did that, then we would have had to cancel the ‘B’ team game and instead of playing four quarters against good competition, they get a couple plays in a game.”

So those are the ABCs of the situation from a former D-coordinator who has to know what’s next: Some team, some day, will try to go all Urban Meyer on Widener.

“We kind of really addressed it the best we could with our kids because that was the most important thing,” Collins said. “Our standpoint was, ‘We are proud of what you did. You worked hard. There was no taunting. There was no finger-pointing. It was a good, clean football game.’ And my hope is that is not overshadowed because of the score. You’ve got to give those kids some credit.”

Widener was ranked No. 18 nationally before the Wilkes game, and No. 18 after. The credit, then, must be coming on a delayed handoff, on a counter, on a double reverse. From either side of a romp, Isaac Collins knows how that works, too.